After a long weekend of organizing, packing, and repacking, we finally had our entire life packed up into the bed of Ryan’s Tacoma. We were about as organized as we could be, so we said sayonara to St. Pete and we were on our way.
Our first destination was Athens to stay with our friends Julie and Elliot.
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Julie & Elliot’s house- Athens, GA
Even though this town is home to the University of Georgia,
it was very quaint and our hosts had the perfect set up
not too far from the heart of town.
Julie took us to some great little hiking areas down the road,
Baba Wing enjoying some watermelon!
and the local farmers market,
where we got some watermelon, yum!
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Julie also showed us the The State Botanical Garden of Georgia which has over 300 acres
of natural land, with some of that cultivated into various plant communities. There were so many beautiful gardens of fruit and vegetable plants, herbs, and flowers.
Heritage Garden
We were very thankful that Julie showed us around , but Ryan and I had a few ideas of our own, some things you just have to do while in Georgia.
1. Visit the GA aquarium– home to the only whale sharks in the U.S. and of course cute penguins! 
It was nice to see, but definitely not what we quite anticipated. There weren’t very many educational blurbs for each exhibit and the facility was pretty small. I guess I had imagined something much greater, but it was certainly worth making a trip to see.
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2. Drink a 40. Hey, they’re illegal in Florida, and they save on packaging 😉
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3. Eat some good ‘ol Georgia peaches…which oddly enough we found no source of peaches other than the grocery store. So we didn’t get to check that one off the list.
Now we are off to our first farm stay, which will be at the Blue Ridge Co-op in Glenville, NC. As we leave Julie’s we are excited and a bit nervous, wondering what our first farm stay will be like…
Just as Free 